The Universal Smedley - 2

The Universal Smedley

You know the name Winston Churchill (photo) because he was a British figure during WW II.

But, if you are like most of us you are not so much aware of his "architectural skills."

You also know about the recent Bangladesh building collapse which killed over a thousand people (Bangladesh Building Collapse).

But how much do you know about the structure of a collapsing society whose architects are extolled right up to and including the last fatal moments?

In today's post let's take a look at Winston Churchill's architectural work which helped design the pillars of our current human civilization; architectural work done to a substantial degree because of a fundamental religious belief still currently very active in the minds of hundreds of officials in the U.S. government.

Then we will compare the warnings about that Bangladesh building to the similar warnings about the structure of civilization, and how the warnings concerning the building in Bangladesh constitute a metaphor or epitome of current civilization:

Long before politicians mewled helplessly about the power of “Big Oil”, carbon-based fuels were shaping our very political, legal, intellectual, and physical structures.
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For instance, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a pivotal moment in America’s strategic outlook. America, a global hegemon whose empire was weakening, seized the second largest oil deposits in the world as a way of preventing its economic and political decline.
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The last declining global hegemon, Great Britain, also engaged in a brutal and highly controversial British occupation of Iraq, in the 1920s, pressed aggressively by the well-known British conservative, Winston Churchill.

(Book Review of "Carbon Democracy", emphasis added). Churchill was a conservative in the mold of today's American conservatives in government, in the Oil-Qaeda sense, and like them he also believed:

From the moment he arrived at the Admiralty, a young man of destiny, Churchill started to prepare the fleet for the Battle of Armageddon he believed was inevitable.

(John McCain's Book About Churchill, emphasis added). Now, before we begin to analyze this, let me add the third pillar of the structure of current civilization:

Then, in 1911, the German Kaiser provoked the Agadir crisis ... Churchill went to the Admiralty and his outlook transformed. He was immediately confronted with the decisive question: to convert the navy from coal to oil ... the "fateful plunge" was made ... in April 1912 ... five oil-burning battleships were approved.
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Britain was well supplied with coal [but not oil]. It was the Royal Navy which was the impetus for the development of the oil industry in Britain. The problem was supply and the security of that supply. Initially, the British government purchased shares in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, subsequently, British Petroleum [BP].

(Winston S. Churchill, by Eugene L. Rasor, p. 157-58). That molded the cogs on the gears of U.S. foreign policy ideology too:

Then, to prevent further disruptions, Britain enmeshed itself ever more deeply in the Middle East, working to install new shahs in Iran and carve Iraq out of the collapsing Ottoman Empire.

Churchill fired the starting gun, but all of the Western powers joined the race to control Middle Eastern oil.

(Oil-Qaeda: The Deadliest Parasite Of Civilization - 2). The Dredd Blog series The Peak Of The Oil Wars, The Peak of The Oil Lies, and The Peak of Sanity deal with the events following the design of that foreign policy architecture.

The mentality of the foreign policy that rushes headlong into the destruction of civilization in order to save civilization is obviously insane, however, it is also obviously an institutionalized madness hidden in plain sight (MOMCOM's Dissociation).

The policy of staying addicted to oil has led to a seemingly schizophrenic government policy where what he have fought for is causing global warming which Navy Admirals now say is the greatest threat to the Navy:

America’s top military officer in charge of monitoring hostile actions by North Korea, escalating tensions between China and Japan, and a spike in computer attacks traced to China provides an unexpected answer when asked what is the biggest long-term security threat in the Pacific region: climate change.
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[Another] Navy Admiral even believes that Singapore will no longer be the greatest ocean port, but that a port in Greenland will take that honor, because after the polar ice caps melt in the Arctic, the fabled Northwest Passage will become strategic, and the Panama Canal will become somewhat of a museum piece.

(All Weather is Local - 4). So, the Lord of The British Admiralty believed that the Battle of Armageddon was coming, so he chose oil as the drug of choice for the military so as to give Britain an advantage.

Then, other nations followed suit, which eventually led to the oil wars, which then led to global warming and by now have come full circle to create a great threat to the military.

A more recent twist to this sordid story is that many government officials in the U.S. do not want to do anything about global warming because they also believe in the time-ending Battle of Armageddon:

A study claims that successive US administrations have failed to take aggressive policy action to curb climate change partly because a large number of Americans

Blog de Christo

take a fatalistic stance on the future of the planet informed by religious doctrine.

According to David C. Barker of the University of Pittsburgh and David H. Bearce of the University of Colorado, biblical eschatology or "end-time" doctrine centered on the belief in the "Second Coming" of Jesus Christ is a major factor underlying the resistance to addressing global climate change issues in the US.

(Oil-Qaeda: The Deadliest Parasite Of Civilization - 2). In closing, remember that in a fairly recent post of a Dredd Blog series we noted that this military religion is actually the ancient Middle Eastern religion Mitraism, which had a tenet involving a strong belief in a time-ending war (The Virgin MOMCOM - 6).

So, do you think that "there are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke" (as Bob Dylan wrote in "All Along The Watchtower") is relevant to the collapse of the Bangladesh building, which the owners were warned about --but ignored?

And is also related to certain policies causing cracks in current civilization?

The previous post in this series is here.

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The lyrics to the following song can be read here.

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Oil-Qaeda: The Deadliest Parasite Of Civilization - 2

Oilah Akbar Magic / Disney World

In today's post of this series let's consider the women captives in Ohio (which has been on the news this week) as an epitome or metaphor for Oil-Qaeda's capture of civilization via its deceiving ways of propaganda (to the point of addicting billions of people ... "the first barrel is free").

One of the battles civilization is waging shows some of the results of years of doublespeak engendering propaganda that has been injected into the consciousness of Americans.

Much of it is injected by corporate commercialization of the airwaves, other is through government generated propaganda, but it all has one purpose: to distort reality.

The fundamental error that accompanies endless media airwaves pollution is the magical thinking which allures our minds to soothe ourselves with the illusion that pollution causes no harm to the nation, civilization, or planet being polluted.

You may be thinking "that sounds like a stretch Dredd, so what do you mean?"

In the U.S. Senate we see a religious debate going on about magical thinking and about Oil-Qaeda's part in captivating our minds and bodies (all of us have some degree of the results of magical twinkie thinking in and on us - see A Closer Look At MOMCOM's DNA - 2).

The global climate system damage is being revealed by scientists all around the world, but that scientific discussion does not sit well with those who think science wants to kill their god, gods, or God:

A study claims that successive US administrations have failed to take aggressive policy action to curb climate change partly because a large number of Americans

Blog de Christo

take a fatalistic stance on the future of the planet informed by religious doctrine.

According to David C. Barker of the University of Pittsburgh and David H. Bearce of the University of Colorado, biblical eschatology or "end-time" doctrine centered on the belief in the "Second Coming" of Jesus Christ is a major factor underlying the resistance to addressing global climate change issues in the US.

(Digital Journal, emphasis added). Never mind separation of Church and State, the U.S. Senate was recently the location of a debate where a Senator said that religion teaches that God will not allow humanity to damage the planet Earth.

In rebuttal another Senator called that magical thinking, not valid religious ideology (see video below of Senate floor speech).

I don't want to urge anyone to hear me saying that magical thinking is limited to the worlds of religion, no, it is everywhere Oil-Qaeda has been chanting "Oilah Akbar!":

Their [our] lack of knowledge is unsurprising; beyond the ranks of petroleum-industry historians, Churchill's outsize role in the history of energy is insufficiently appreciated.

Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911. With characteristic vigor and verve, he set about modernizing the Royal Navy, jewel of the empire. The revamped fleet, he proclaimed, should be fueled with oil, rather than coal—a decision that continues to reverberate in the present. Burning a pound of fuel oil produces about twice as much energy as burning a pound of coal. Because of this greater energy density, oil could push ships faster and farther than coal could.

Churchill's proposal led to emphatic dispute. The United Kingdom had lots of coal but next to no oil. At the time, the United States produced almost two-thirds of the world's petroleum; Russia produced another fifth. Both were allies of Great Britain. Nonetheless, Whitehall was uneasy about the prospect of the Navy's falling under the thumb of foreign entities, even if friendly. The solution, Churchill told Parliament in 1913, was for Britons to become "the owners, or at any rate, the controllers at the source of at least a proportion of the supply of natural oil which we require." Spurred by the Admiralty, the U.K. soon bought 51 percent of what is now British Petroleum, which had rights to oil "at the source": Iran (then known as Persia). The concessions' terms were so unpopular in Iran that they helped spark a revolution. London worked to suppress it. Then, to prevent further disruptions, Britain enmeshed itself ever more deeply in the Middle East, working to install new shahs in Iran and carve Iraq out of the collapsing Ottoman Empire.

Churchill fired the starting gun, but all of the Western powers joined the race to control Middle Eastern oil.

(What If We Never Run Out of Oil, emphasis added). The subsequent oil wars are still raging, and it fact, are now taking us in the direction of the big one.

Click on the Series Posts Tab at the top of any Dredd Blog post and browse down to the "Oil" section where links to the history of oil addiction and oil wars from the U.S. perspective is available.

The previous post in this series is here.

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Senator Whitehouse calls out the Preachers of Denial:

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Noonan's Grace of Torture Murder - 2

This is history?

Upon occasion we review history to see if we are repeating mistakes recorded in history, or whether we have learned from bad mistakes by refusing to repeat them.

Regular readers know that Dredd Blog recently covered one bad mistake: torture by the U.S. government.

That history is documented in The Constitution Project's Detainee Report ("CPDR").

The CPDR is a comprehensife report which was recently released to the public (see On The Recent Condemnation of Torture and On The Recent Condemnation of Torture - 2).

That mistake of history seems like a no-brainer, but it is more complicated than that -- as shown by the post on today's date in 2009 concerning what journalists were saying about torture back then:

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This morning on Morning Joe on MSNBC, Peggy Noonan came to work in the fashion of "the 1935 nice people of Germany".

Those masters of nattering pabulum that paved the path of Adolf Hitler with nice nattering nothingness until he was killing millions before they knew it.

I now call that nattering pabulum "the grace of torture murder".

Her type of nattering pabulum can softly purr out how wrong it would be to prosecute those who torture prisoners to death because of the grace of being nice to everyone.

Brain dead!

Professor Jonathan Turley has a handle on this madness:

For many people around the world, it is a sign of the decline of American moral leadership that we continue to debate whether the government should prosecute those involved the Bush torture program. Their confusion is understandable. Under our existing treaty obligations, we agreed to prosecute such crimes and we have prosecuted others for precisely the same acts for decades. The real question should be: Should the United States violate international law to shield individuals accused of war crimes? Our answer to that question will define or redefine this country for generations.

(Three Legal Truths, emphasis added). Noonan got tough and said that it could involve democrats so we can't do it. She says Cheney is out talking about it because he is afraid. Yes he is afraid. But then she says Cheney is afraid that the terrorists will attack us if we stop water boarding.

Brain dead!

Cheney is afraid he is going to be prosecuted for conspiracy to commit torture murder. Professor Jonathan Turley has another handle on this madness:

Notably, in the last few months, the many law professors who once defended the torture program have largely disappeared. The shrinking number of apologists for the Bush administration are left with largely political arguments in the face of three unassailable legal truths. First, waterboarding is torture. Second, torture is a war crime. Third, the United States is obligated to prosecute war crimes.

(Three Legal Truths, emphasis added). And so there it is.

The entire dialogue and reality is quite simple: the real United States of America will stand up and the world will deal with it accordingly.

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The previous post in this series is here.

MOMCOM's Dissociation

"Cow farts did it." - Boehner

Have you heard statements about saving the birds and the bees?

Saving the whales and the polar bears?

Saving the environment?

Saving the climate?

In today's post let's explore the hypothesis that the proper statement to cover saving all of those things is really "saving civilization"; and further, that the misuse of those statements in place of the accurate statement of reality is actually evidence of a social disorder.

The misstatements and/or misunderstandings are signs of the psychological phenomenon encapsulated in whole or in part by the term dissociation:

Dissociation is a term in psychology describing a wide array of experiences from mild detachment from immediate surroundings to more severe detachment from physical and emotional experience. It is commonly displayed on a continuum. The major characteristic of all dissociative phenomena involves a detachment from reality – rather than a loss of reality as in psychosis. In mild cases, dissociation can be regarded as a coping mechanism or defense mechanisms in seeking to master, minimize or tolerate stress – including boredom or conflict. At the nonpathological end of the continuum, dissociation describes common events such as daydreaming while driving a vehicle. Further along the continuum are non-pathological altered states of consciousness.

(Wikipedia). I suppose dissociation could also be seen as just another word for the more commonly used term denial:

Dissociation is a psychological term used to describe a mental departure from reality.
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People who dissociate sometimes believe feelings over facts. What they feel at a particular time becomes reality for them. As their moods change, they may rearrange or rewrite facts to make them more consistent with the way they feel.

When confronted with “hard evidence” which contradicts the way we instinctively feel about something, most people feel a sense of discomfort (cognitive dissonance) However, if the information is compelling enough, most of us will learn to adjust our opinions or our feelings in order to maintain a consistent world view.

People who disassociate however, are able to reject or modify “hard evidence” if it does not support the way they feel or believe the world to be.

(Out of The Fog). Regular readers know that Dredd Blog has, from time to time, explored the notions of psychoanalysis for groups; even groups as large as nations, or even as large as civilization itself:

"I would not say that such an attempt to apply psychoanalysis to civilized society would be fanciful or doomed to fruitlessness." - Sigmund Freud

“Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

“The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

(Social Dementia Causes Heated Misunderestimations). There is that phrase people use sometimes, "I don't feel like myself today", which comes to mind when thinking about civilization in this context.

Perhaps governments within what we call civilization should remember that phrase when they choose to destroy ecosystems.

There seems to be some form of dissociation at work when civilization, in the person of government, does not realize that the Earth and civilization are symbiotic in the sense that we cannot exist in any environment that does not support human life.

Destroying that which we must have in order to exist in our present, physical form is suicide, ecocide, or Earthicide (or "all of the above").

It goes even further, because civilization cannot exist even if it merely harms the Earth's environment beyond a certain point.

A point that we are scientifically unaware of currently, but a point we are heading in the direction of at full speed, at this moment.

Try to grasp the dissociation in one ongoing observable phenomenon:

There has been concern in the past ten years or so about the mysterious disappearing of entire groups or hives of bees.

Bee keepers and scientists alike share the concern, and we who rely on the bees should too:

It has been stated by several biologists that, if it were not for the honey bee pollinating plants, humans would only last 3 or 4 years as our food supply would disappear [but see here].

(Space). How it got to this is debatable ,,,

(Will We Destroy Food - The Bees?). Bee extinction is less debatable right now because it is becoming politicized, like global warming, so the dissociation is likely to increase.

But bee extinction is also less debatable because Oil-Qaeda has been implicated through its subversive subgroups that produce bee killing chemicals:

Neonicotinoids are a class of neuro-active insecticides chemically related to nicotine. The development of this class of insecticides began with work in the 1980s by Shell and the 1990s by Bayer.

(Wikipedia, emphasis added). A recent blog at Huffington Post indicates that segments of civilization are one bad winter away from another disaster (America Is One Bad Winter Away From A Food Disaster).

The government agencies that deal with these issues have been subverted from within by Oil-Qaeda money's corrupting influence.

Resist Oil-Qaeda.

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Of Monsters and Men - Dirty Paws ...

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Origin of the Classic Nuclear Bully - 2

"Bigga Badda Boom" - The Fifth Element

Have you noticed that Israel has been bombing Syria this past week?

The Washington Post has an article about it (Syrian report: Israel bombs outskirts of Damascus for second time in recent days).

Let's think about some of the serious ramifications of a Middle East area wide conflict, in terms of it getting out of hand.

In the first post of this series Dredd Blog pointed out the shocking reality that the U.S. and Israeli governments refused to attend the scheduled talks about a nuclear weapons-free zone (NWFZ) in the Middle East.

All the other relevant Middle East Nations, except Israel, have signed on to nuclear non-proliferation world wide:

The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) was opened for signature in 1968 and entered into force in 1970. It has nearly 190 Parties, giving it the largest membership of any arms control treaty in the world. The Treaty comprises legally binding nonproliferation commitments and is the basis for international cooperation on stemming the spread of nuclear weapons. It is widely regarded as the legal and political cornerstone of the nuclear nonproliferation regime and as containing three main concepts or “pillars” – nuclear nonproliferation, disarmament, and the peaceful use of nuclear energy. In Prague on April 5, 2009 President Obama said that the basic bargain at the core of the Treaty is sound: “countries with nuclear weapons will move towards disarmament; countries without nuclear weapons will not acquire them; and all countries can access peaceful nuclear energy.” The President also called on NPT parties to take steps to strengthen this vital nonproliferation instrument.

(U.S. State Department Website, emphasis added). The nations that are not part of, that is, have not signed or committed to the treaty are India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan and South Sudan (Wikipedia).

As an offshoot of that overall treaty, a nuclear free Middle East focus was subsequently envisioned, so the the U.S. became one of the organizers.

Somehow Israel has now evidently persuaded the U.S. to renege on that proposal:

High-level talks between Israel and its Muslim neighbors regarding a nuclear weapons-free zone (NWFZ) in the Middle East have been canceled by the US and Israel.

A nuclear weapons-free zone has been repeatedly proposed, only to have Israel – the only state in the region with nuclear weapons – reject it in favor of maintaining this nuclear monopoly, further destabilizing the region, and keeping the threat of others’ nukes as a primary excuse for its militarism.

Diplomats tell the Associated Press that the US, one of the organizers of the meeting on this latest NWFZ proposal, would likely make a formal announcement of its cancellation soon, claiming that “the time was not opportune.”

While Iran is a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has publicly pledged its opposition to nuclear weapons development, has subjected itself to thorough international inspections, and in fact has exactly zero nuclear weapons, Israel has done none of the above and has approximately 200 nuclear warheads. Iran is being severely punished and threatened with attack, Israel is supported with unparalleled economic, military, and diplomatic support.

(Origin of the Classic Nuclear Bully). Is this the way to persuade the rest of the nations that Israel and the U.S. are the ones who want peace?

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

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Imagine Dragons - Radioactive (lyrics here) ...

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